Nick Bryan

blogging

My Writing Environment And Me

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That’s where the magic happens. My base station, where I sit for hours to bring you this red-hot stream of content. As you can see, it is untidy. But aren’t “creatives” honourbound to be a disorganised mess? So is this an optimum writing environment, or should I get my shit together and purge my desk with a match?

Sometimes in these blog posts, I leap onto my high horse, but this one will be more tentative, because finding a writing environment in which I can reliably do some damn work has always eluded me.

One possible conclusion: environment is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether I’m huddled in my pit or a nice clean branch of Pret, I will work if I’m in the mood. Because, yes, I enjoy sitting in a coffee shop impersonating a pretentious nob, but I don’t always get a huge amount done.

Still, there are a couple of environmental factors which matter.

Distractions (okay, the internet)

Sometimes, I am on form and can brilliantly forge ahead with work, whilst keeping up an IM conversation, tweeting intermittently and checking my email whenever it pings. But I will admit those days are rare.

More often, the productivity comes when I step away from the internet, either genuinely bored of it or thinking “Look, fuck this, I have to do something today”. So, yes, if I want to sort my environment out, getting rid of the internet is a big step.

And that’s one reason why going to a cafe with my terrible netbook sometimes works. It can’t connect to the internet, as this burns the battery in minutes.

Peer Pressure

I started going to NaNoWriMo writing groups in 2010. Long before that, myself and my friend Paul used to spur each other on through NaNo with competitive word count battles, complete with embarrassingly geeky trash talk on Messenger.

And I’m forced to admit, more even than turning off the internet, bouncing off other writers does help me get stuff done. Even in smaller groups (right now, I’m in a sandwich shop with five others), it kickstarts my childhood Catholic-rooted guilt brilliantly.

In the future, if the writing ever brings the money in, I might hire an assistant. Aside from the usual boring tasks like accounts and making the tea, their main tasks will be to turn off my internet whenever I need to work, and then stare at me judgmentally until I get on with it. Whether I’ll be happy is debatable, but maybe productive at least.

If anyone wants to do this for free, applications welcome in the comments section. Or, you know, share any tips you’ve picked up about making the writing environment work.

I Am Not A Travel Writer

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As Twitter followers may know, I am currently on holiday in Austria. However, we are currently having an internet break, so I am going to try and honour my blogging commitment by posting about writing.

(It is currently Monday rather than Tuesday, and I`m sorry if this confuses anyone. I decided the wrong day is better than nothing.)

It may not be as long as usual, I can only apologise, but it is going to tackle a writing impulse I get whenever I go away: the urge to try and be a travel writer.

Because, y`know, I write, I think I`m decent at it, and when I go on holiday, I`m seized by the need to chronicle my holiday in a poetic or emotive fashion. After all, for a writer all life is research (unfortunate for anyone trying to date us, but there it is), and holidays cost money, so why shouldn`t I try and get material out of it?

Well, firstly because I don`t exactly have a soaring, poetic style. But more fundamentally, and this is a problem I found when I used to write blog posts about my so-called “real life”, the proper human world is annoyingly reluctant to follow a standard narrative structure. Hence why I now restrict my real world observations to Twitter, where they get all the length and depth they deserve.

And that`s okay. I mean, if people are interested in my holiday, they can ask me (Feel free to do so in the comments!), but I don`t think the world needs an epic work about it. Luckily, this has come to me quickly whenever I`ve sat down to try and write such a thing and just found that… yeah, this is just a list, isn`t it?

I mean, good fun for me at the time, but I`m a fiction writer with a TV-blogging sideline, not a diarist or Bill Bryson. Even The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin who I admire greatly, suffers from a lack of real climax, no matter how much Sorkin tries to play up the events towards the end. And we let him off maybe, because he was adapting someone else`s book about events beyond his control, so he did the best he can. Still, I see no reason to knowingly dive into this problem.

Don`t get me wrong, I`m not saying this is impossible. There`s a lot of great work out there about holidays and travel and so on, the afore-mentioned Bryson for one, I`m not saying no-one is a travel writer. I`m just saying… pretty sure I`m not.

“Actually”, it’s terrible

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Once I’ve completed a piece of writing, there are a few steps  I take before showing it to anyone else or slap it up online. Some involve factchecking, rephrasing and reading stuff aloud, but by far the most inevitable and aggravating is hacking “actually” and its tedious ilk outta there.

Equivocators, qualifiers, half-arsed fence-sitting non-words that do nothing except sound clunky and damage the meaning of whatever you were trying to say.

I like to think everyone suffers from an abundance of this crap in early drafts, but my work is always painfully riddled with it. “Actually”, “somewhat”, “quite”, “a little bit”.All of them can piss off and die in a medium-depth swamp.

Even on Twitter, if I don’t glance over messages before I send them, I often end up, much to my fury, somehow jamming two occurrences of “actually” or “actual” into only 140 characters. Where do they come from? Do I have a brain tumour spewing some kind of waste product into the rough area of my lobes that manifests itself as an actual abundance of kinda pointless little words with quite literally no use?

(Hope not.)

For longer pieces of work (meaning anything beyond 1-2000 words), I have a step in my redrafting where I do nothing but run a ‘Find’ in my word processor for all the stupid non-words I can think of and bring a Stalinist purge down upon them.

So, anyway, I thought I’d use what little platform I have to check: everyone else has this problem, right? Is there a cure? Because, even if it involves brain surgery, I’m ready to consider it at this stage.

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – Untimely Book Review

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You thought my review of Genus was tardy? Well, I’ve topped that: this Untimely Book Review covers The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which has a battered sticker on the cover pledging allegiance to Richard & Judy’s Book Club 2005!

But I remember when this damn book was everywhere, so I’m hoping a few of you have read it. Let’s talk!

This is one of those amazing high-concept stories where the premise is in the title, but I’ll break it down anyway: this covers the meeting, wedding and more of Henry and Clare, out of order, because Henry has a strange genetic disorder causing random time travel. (No, I don’t consider their marriage a spoiler. For some unknown reason.)

That’s really kinda it. It’s romance with a sci-fi twist, and for about the first half, I was enjoying it. The out-of-sequence courtship was sweet, and there are enough clever uses of time travel thrown in to make it appealing to people like me, who are reading because they like soft sci-fi/Doctor Who, and want to see what the fuss was about.

Of course, the romance boot eventually drops as it was always going to. The inventive time-twisting continues to the very end, to be fair, but angst and melodrama kick in damn hard too. If you want to believe that life won’t immediately become miserable once you get married, don’t read this book, because that’s more or less the plot.

Oh, and Henry is a very obvious hot-indie-kid character at times. Yes, Niffenegger goes out of her way to say how damaged he is, but never makes it matter, because Clare will inevitably fix him. That’s one downside of the ongoing pre-determination theme, I suppose. Saps drama.

Which brings me to the ending (NON-SARCASTIC SPOILERS NOW) where the inevitable happens and then the book just stops, all character threads except the Henry/Clare relationship hanging in mid-air. It reads more like a memoir than a real novel, and if that’s what you’re trying to do, then fair enough, but I like novels to feel more plotted.

I feel bad looking back over this review, because there were lengthy spells, even in the grim second half, when I was genuinely enjoying this book. I’ve probably made it sound like the whole thing was drudgery, but if the central idea of “romance with sci-fi twist” completely appeals, it’s probably worth reading. I’m just not much of a romance reader.

I say all this as if everyone who cares hasn’t already read it, of course. But if you can remember what you thought of this book, feel free to disagree with me in the comments.

“It’s All… Papery” – Returning To Print Books

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I’ve had a Kindle for a year, and it’s fast become my primary method of reading. I love the interface, the convenience, the way I don’t have to fill up any more space with piles of books, which attract dust in vast quantities and give me allergy seizures.

So, yes, I am an ereader convert. But some people, my so-called friends, are behind me on the development scale and keep lending me books made of dead trees. I finished one such novel the other day and thought I’d share some thoughts on my re-entry onto paper.

Get Some Physio

Considering how much Kindle hatred there is out there, you’d expect picking up a real book to be a revelatory experience, making the story a million times better and exuding some magic smell. (Because it’s always about the smell, isn’t it? Hey, guys, computers can have odour too, especially when the cooling fan fails and the motherboard burns.)

But you know, I didn’t notice much different. Yes, it’s weird measuring your progress in page numbers again, rather than abstract percentages, and feeling a physical change under your right hand as the plot falls away. And flicking through regular books to check stuff for your reviews is way easier, that is one big plus point for them.

But you know what I have to do with paper books? Protect the fragile little darlings from getting bashed around, especially this one that wasn’t mine, find my place manually rather than automatically, carry a heavier rucksack, accept that other people on the tube can see what I’m reading. (Fortunately, it wasn’t porn, it was The Time Traveller’s Wife. Untimely Book Review to follow.)

Get Some Therapy

So, inane revelation time: books and ereaders are different in some ways and not others. And, yes, there are problems with Kindle brand dominance – I’m not a huge fan of Amazon being the only place I can easily buy stuff.

But. I’d rather we talk about actual issues like that, rather than throwing a tantrum about methods of reading. It’s just data, and I say this as an experienced IT professional. I’ve always been insistent that how I display and consume my data is up to me, ever since I was a little boy and my Mum tried to make me read the Radio Times instead of using Teletext. (Sorry, American readers, I may have lost you there.)

And speaking of young kids: people who do things like refer to the Kindle as “the K-word”? Not a great look, folks.

So, where do you stand on the Kindle/book debate? Have you gone back to books, and did you experience whiplash? Comment! Below!

(And yes, I took that picture of my Kindle on top of a pile of books. I know, I know, the layers of meaning are stunning.)

Dialogue – The Writer’s Crack?

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Close followers of my work here, specifically the Friday stories, might note I’ve done a few in an all-dialogue format. Like this one, also one of my only “science-fiction” stories. Or kinda this one too. And the new one I’ve just written for Friday. So clearly I’m a big fan.

It’s just easy to write, isn’t it? Flows off the tongue like, well, speech. Maybe it’s the hours I spent reading those Aaron Sorkin script books, but I kinda love it. Unfortunately, I also worry I enjoy it too much sometimes. (Hence the title – apologies if anyone was expect an ode to the creative arse.)

“Ah, Rupert, I see you are removing the badger from the toaster.”

This is the biggest issue I have when writing largely in dialogue, and I’ve been knocked around for it by tutors: the danger of getting over-theatrical.

This results in characters saying things like the above, basically filling in for the absence of prose or stage directions. After all, the reader won’t know what’s going on if the characters don’t state it, but they also end up talking in a way no-one does in real life.

On the other hand, this is a very specific problem. If you have any prose (or stage directions if you’re writing script) then, hey, problem solved.

“The angry badger has embedded itself in the wall whilst trying to extinguish the fire in its tail.”

Dialogue often has the fun bits, doesn’t it? This problem is particularly common in speed-writing projects like NaNoWriMo, but for me, it’s a never-ending battle: dialogue rolls off easily, prose requires hard work.

So, when editing, I end up chopping out a lot of the dialogue. Yes, even if that joke was awesome, sadly, it often isn’t necessary, so you have to kill your babies. (NOT LITERALLY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.) I’ve also been writing more in the first person, which circumvents the problem by making narration more chatty. Clever, eh?

“Um, I don’t wanna, y’know, moan, but would someone reeeally put a badger in a toaster?”

It’s been established by smarter minds than me that fictional dialogue is rarely “realistic”. I may love the stylised dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, but people don’t really talk like that.

So we stumble across the distinction between “realistic” and “believable”. Strictly realistic dialogue would feature a lot of “um” and “kinda”, and reading it would be a nightmare. Awful BBC improv drama True Love featured actors improvising the banal conversations real people would have, and watching it was like dying and discovering hell is a never-ending bus queue.

So, in summation, dialogue is amazing, as long as it isn’t over-theatrical, over-used or too believable. Did I cover everything? What are your dialogue issues? Feel free to comment below, I need fodder for the follow-up post.